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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and
voted up or down.

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Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted
to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning,
there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

It's fast, efficient and works with all filenames (spaces and anything).

To do the same with plain files:

chmod 644 **/*(.)

For those not familiar with zsh wildcards, this is how the above commands work: "**" is the same as "*", but it works recursively down the directory tree, so you don't have to use the find command. Any wildcard pattern can be followed by a set of flags in parentheses (there must be no space between!): "(/)" restricts the matches to directories only, and "(.)" does the same for plain files. There are many more wildcards and flags; this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Actually, koukos was right here -- using "{} +" in a find -exec command tells find to build the command with every matching file /before/ execution, so chmod would only be invoked once (unlike using "{} \;" which tells it to invoke the command once for every file matched)

I have a shared drive here in the office which I occasionally get permission problems with for other users, so I use

find . ! -perm /g=r -exec chmod g+r {} +

a lot: turns on the group readable bit for any files that don't currently have it on, in one invokation of chmod.

Beware, the ^above "zsh" method misses hidden files and folders. While there may be a way around this with zsh's options, why waste the time when `find` is Unix standard? Will zsh also search by perms or times? Will zsh combine search methods? Always pick the right tool for the job; `find` is for *finding*